Quote:
Originally Posted by pinn3r
^ i stopped though ... 'cause smoking is fucking retarded. i had an epiphany and realized how important life & health is. it's a temporary euphoria for the price of permanently blackening my lungs .. absolute shit
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Smoking doesn't actually "permanently" blacken your lungs -- the cells of your airways continually die and regenerate as with all other parts of your body. What DOES happen however, is that your body senses the foreign ash/chemicals etc, and mounts an immune response against them. It brings lots of defense cells to attack that area, thinking it's bacteria or fungal cells etc etc. These cells kill shit by releasing acid, harmful enzymes (things that break down things), and in general cause damage to the lining of the airways. So what happens when you cut yourself? The body heals the area but the new cells aren't the same -- they're tough, thick, and inelastic compared to the original skin -- hence the "scab!"
This also occurs, inside your airways. The airways become gradually thicker, until suddenly years later (or MANY smokes later), you have sudden difficulty breathing -- this is called Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, or COPD. In essence, your airways have become internally scabbed up, and the space for air to move has been shrunk.
The above immune self attack also causes holes to form in the airway tissues, causing lost air pressure, and further difficulty breathing.
Smoking also clogs up the hairs that remove bacteria and dust, increasing the chance of bacterial infections.
Smoking also hardens your blood vessels faster, leading to higher rates of heart disease, whereby the harder, inelastic vessels cause blood pressure to increase, and cause your heart to work harder, become more muscular, and thus reduce the volume of the interior chambers, thus reducing blood moving capacity (heart failure).
The previous mentioned immune attack also hardens (fibrosis/scar) the airways at the lung/blood vessel exchange -- thus it is harder for tired blood to exchange oxygen with new air at the lungs, and thus the blood ends up pooling in the person's legs (why some old heavy smokers have huge swollen ankles/lower legs).
For girls, smoking is also even worse -- due to the chemicals in cigarette smoking killing blood vessels and reducing overall blood flow, they get less blood to the bones, thus reducing the level of calcium rebuilding. Since girls/women eventually get menopause and hormone drops, they are at far higher risk of having low bone density so that in older years, they will be at greater risks of shattering their hips/bones.
Smoking also causes cancer. True story.